TW: POCD, masturbation, talk about kinks Hello! I’ve decided to re-download this app today after nearly two years. I wanted to come here and dump some of mu thoughts because I know how helpful it is to share them with a community of people who feel the same. I had my first problematic intrusive thought 3 years ago (I say problematic because it was paralyzing and shook my whole world, i probably already had ocd before that but I didn’t know that was what it was called). A lot of things have changed for me since those days, thankfully I got used to the thoughts enough to not be affected by them as I once was. However, the part that we’re all familiar with comes into part after that: “What if it wasn’t ocd?” “What if I’m faking all of it?” “What if I somehow managed to fool everyone into thinking I’m a good person when in reality i’m capable of all these things my brain comes up with?”. I started going to therapy a year in a half ago, I think it was mostly due to the pandemic and things that weren’t exactly related to my ocd. I also think that if I tried going to therapy specifically because of my ocd I would’ve never gone in the first place, because of how scary it is to face it. This is one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this here today. I really don’t know how to bring up ocd with my therapist. I absolutely love my therapist, I believe I got really lucky when I found her and I think we built a good therapeutic bond that helps me trust her, but it’s still so hard to bring my intrusive thoughts up. I mentioned it once in passing and told her that I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet, but I feel like I won’t ever heal if I don’t. It feels like for years i’ve been swiping dirt under the rug and now it’s finally getting to me. This is the part that includes the TW. My intrusive thoughts originally related to POCD, I’ve gotten much better at them and I can be around kids and play with them like any other person would, but some times I wonder why the anxiety stopped, why did my brain chose THAT to obsess over. I can’t help to psychoanalyse myself and look for a root cause for those thoughts to understand. The scariest part is that sometimes if I’m horny I usually go to erotic literature for release, and the “kinks” (if you can call it that) that get me off are the ones where there’s a power imbalance or one of the parties is submissive to the other (always consenting adults, the mere thought of something else makes me want to throw up). I can’t help but think that there’s something wrong with me when I think of this, I really feel like a sick person and I end up crying immediately after because I enjoyed it and I shouldn’t have. Now, I don’t think the type of erotica or porn that one chooses to consume defines us as human beings, but it definitely is something that I think about because it must have something to with our subconsciousness. This is where my OCD comes up in these thoughts, because sometimes when I realize that I don’t feel the anxiety anymore and I don’t stop to think about the thoughts, I immediately think it’s because I got used to them and I no longer think there’s something wrong with those actions and I wouldn’t care if I became that person (i say actions as opposed to thoughts, because I genuinely believe there’s nothing wrong with the thoughts themselves). This is the hard part about healing from the anxiety of the thoughts, you’re always checking to see if you still think they’re wrong or if you’re a horrible person now. I want to bring all of this up with my therapist but I’m so scared to face the possible realities. I’m scared that she won’t know what pure O is, I’m scared that she won’t understand what I’m talking about and would want to stop seeing me, I’m scared that If I bring up my thoughts it’ll change her view of me and all the thing I’ve told her. I’m so scared about bringing up the masturbation part because it truly freaks me out to think about things that I find arousing and what they might say about me. I’ m so so scared of her saying that I don’t have OCD and that my thoughts are very much real. I know most of these fears are irrational, but I can’t help but being scared to open up about them because a lot of things would change and I’ll be facing this monster I’ve been trying to hide from for years. I know I live with my pure o everyday when all I do is think and overthink every thought, word and decision that I have, say or make. But I’m so scared of the possibility of having made all of it up. Part of my brain right now is thinking “you managed to fool all these people in this forum, all of them feel for you now, all of them will think you’re a good person having bad thoughts but you know you’re not” . If you made it to the bottom of this post: thank you, this was very therapeutic for me whether or not someone reads it but I truly appreciate the time you took to read this. Thank you for the space, I would appreciate if anyone has any tips on how to bring up intrusive thoughts in therapy. Have a nice day!!! ❤️

I’ve come to a point in my life where I can be very happy. I have a safe environment, a loving community. Yknow I’ve really healed through or moved on from a traumatic past and as I say to my boyfriend from time to time like a broken record: I feel like nowadays the only thing bringing me stress or at times misery is myself. I am a fairly joyful person, when I’m comfortable I’m very goofy and like to sing dance and have fun. I find that I relate to so many amazing people I meet that are the nicest, most fun, elevating individuals, who also struggle with the hardest sometime debilitating things. It truly sucks because when I find those moments of peace I see the power of what an ocd mind could be as a person. We are people who may over analyze, but I myself also always find the good in people. And aye if in a moment I don’t think anything is doomly wrong and if I don’t try to understand it I may parish 😅 then that moment feels like the best one in the world. But on the other side of that when I’m not in a quiet mind moment and I’m left with myself to take control of what life in front of me looks like in or around me. I almost have been crumbling. Like I said at the beginning of this story here, the life around me is not so situationally stressful. And it’s also fairly simple. My boyfriend and I live together in a small cozy trailer with our two cats, he works full time very hard and I work part time where I spend as much time as I can working and then have a few days around the house. We’re saving for a home and are quite content with our lifestyle at the moment with work and being “lazy”, or resting and going out for fun now an then on our time off together. Most times though I do have day or two off during the week by myself, which usually goes one of only two ways. Like I said before I do like to work hard, especially now that I have a part time job that’s fairly easier than others I’ve had in the past. So I work 6-7 hours then drive home, air up my tires and wash my car sometimes because I like doing something after work while I still have energy.Or I go to the store. Come home make food, prolly nap and not really worry about too much because I’ve worked all day. But on my days off. I find myself waking up with a lot of anxiety. I usually fight it off by going back to sleep. But my OCD is heavily circled around shame. Even though I only sleep in till 10-11, 12-1 at the latest. I find myself thinking about how wrong (in nice terms) it is to do that. And the funny thing is the older I get (I’m a 21F). I’m not as pressured by this thought, even though it’s still stressful it literally just feels like a thought I can’t escape from. To put things in simple terms. I truly psycho analyze my actions breath by breath and my intrusive thoughts are critiquing those actions bit by bit. I’ve recently have started medication and it was a tremendous difference in the beginning and it helped me cope with the acceptance and letting go (f it or just care less) of those thoughts. But let’s say I forget to take it, or I wake up one morning by myself all day and I’m super tired or unmotivated. That day will feel truly debilitated. And now I’m definitely to the point where I’m battling that, but also have a thin vale behind that where I now know what is going on. And the thoughts are shameful for “not trying to get better or be better” Because I do Like I write a lot, and it truly is one of the best coping mechanisms for working through intrusive or obsessive compulsions. I could also write all day, and if I don’t listen to that ease of the anxiety from writing. And try to keep going the writing will turn into a compulsion itself I feel like I should not stop or critique it as well. But luckily I’ll hopefully find my place in explaining the cycle of what I do when my brain is very loud about things. The next time it’s too loud:)

So I know I've talked about my fear of being hacked/watched without my knowledge and at the same time that same fear has also made me scared that i've said incriminating things or confessed to a crime I didn't commit out loud without realizing and that this person (who probably doesn't even exist) is going to use it against me in the future and ruin my life. To the point where I've covered all my device cameras. Yeah, I know. Incredibly outlandish. Anyways. The past few months it's just been my brain convincing me that my life is over or that it's going to end and not just end, but like I'm going to lose everyone that I love because of said "incriminating things" though I know I haven't done anything wrong. Of course, there's a part of me that realises that this is really unlikely because I'm not that important of a person for someone to lie in wait for decades and decide to ruin my life just because though I don't doubt that there are people like that out there (i really hope they're few and far between). However, there's another part of me that also really believes that this is all true. And sometimes I wonder if I'm going insane. Coupled with what I believe are false memories, the anxiety has been taxing every day. And I find it hard to sit with uncertainty because this worst case scenario terrifies me. I'm scared of being unloved and abandoned and also deathly afraid of being perceived as a bad person. And of course, also scared of being a bad person and my brain is convinced that I must be. Anyways. Who knows. Maybe. Maybe not. I wanted to share because I know that OCD or I guess any kind of mental illness (whatever it is I'm suffering from if it isn't OCD) likes to convince us that our fears are too niche and that this worry wouldn't be present if it wasn't real. OCD likes to use that as proof. I've learnt though that there are many people like me on this app, and even though it's still scary, it makes me feel less alone. It can be very tiring and honestly sometimes I ask myself how I'm still here even though it's been a few months and some people on here have experienced episodes like this for years or even decades. I keep hoping I'll wake up one day and it will be like this never happened. If you've taken the time to read this incredibly long waffle session of mine that's more like a drawn-pit diary entry, thank you. And if you feel comfortable with sharing, please do :)

Hey folks, I know I shouldn’t post here and I know what I’m looking for when I do but I just feel so at a loss and OCD is playing the old trick of telling me I don’t have it which I guess is what it’s been doing for a while. My OCD started with a health obsession when I was 12 (I’m 22 now) but went away after a couple of months but didn’t present itself again until I was 17. I thought I had a degenerative disease and struggled with that day in and day out until I eventually accepted that I was going to die and made peace with it and then of course I kept living. OCD was pretty quiet for a few months after that. It would show itself when I had headaches and random aches and pains but it never hooked me as bad. Quite funny actually but I had a weird thing for a couple of months where every time I would go out for a drink I thought I’d wet myself so I’d stand in the bathroom for like 20-30 minutes at a time and that was multiple times across the night. Then in 2021, the theme shifted. I remember it distinctly, I was just lying in bed and a question appeared and that was it. My anxiety was really bad for about a year and then I met my girlfriend and we started dating. OCD went quiet until she moved to another city for university and I started to worry she was being unfaithful or didn’t love me anymore and things like that. With that obsession it kind of came to a head where I realised I either had to fully trust everything despite any doubt I felt or I’d lose her and so it just eventually started to pass. I’ve had a few occasions where I question my love for her and that really hurts because I’m pretty sure I’d be lost without her. That comes and goes though and it usually has to do with a general numbness that I feel after an OCD spike. The theme from 2021 (which I won’t say because I’m somehow worried that someone I know will see this and I will definitely wonder if people near me have seen this post despite it being pretty closed off.) never left but I was somehow able to put it to the back of my mind and get to a point where I was okay. I got a new job in 2024 at a point where I maybe was not ready. New place, new people and for the first 2 months or so it was fine. I even saw some potential triggers before they happened and did my best to ignore them. I got really drunk on a staff night out and when I woke up a lot of what ifs filled my head and I’ve been on my back since then. That brings us to now, my OCD has been pretty bad for about a year now but the weird part (and what I’m making this post about I guess) is that it feels different this time. I know that’s a super common phrase for people with OCD that therapists hear all the time and I have actually taken that piece of information as reassurance a few times over the years but it’s true. I feel so much more confused. I can’t even really explain it. It feels like my brain doesn’t engage or deny the obsession the same way as it used to and of course that makes me believe it’s real and I never actually had OCD. Instead, I’m left with thoughts that don’t give me that sharp feeling of anxiety that they used to and instead just leave me feeling super low and often angry just wishing it would go away. I think it’s probably because I’ve been at this for so long and had the same theme for years and so I’ve in a way habituated to the anxiety and that’s what rationally makes sense to me but like you all know, you can’t reason with this thing. It’s like it gives me just enough anxiety and depression to keep me on the hook and make it feel real but not enough send me into panic like it used to. I used to lie in bed, unable to get up and wishing that I was dead. I guess that now because I don’t feel that way, at least most of the time, my ocd is using that as a way to tell me I never really had it. Also I think I used to rely so heavily on reassurance but now know that I shouldn’t have it I try to avoid it. Without it though, it all feels real and I feel like eventually I will lose myself fully and that’s a fear that makes me feel unfathomably hopeless and makes me dread the future when I used to have dreams and hopes for myself that I looked forward to fulfilling. I don’t want to be big-headed, I just genuinely feel like I could’ve had a really great life and that’s gone now because of this thing. Anyway I just wanted to kind of use this post to get my head straight and map out something that I couldn’t quite explain effectively in therapy. I appreciate everyone who sees this but ask not to give me reassurance, I know we all empathise with each other but I’ve been at this long enough to know that it does none of us any good. I hope everyone is doing well, keep your head up. They tell me there’s a light at the end of this tunnel.